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The Wind Blowing Down Gratiot Avenue
--In the Eastern Market District
Once there was a wind that drove the birds mad.
It was a payment for the King's ransom & it turned waste into gold.
All the supper clubs and lounges glowed like waterfalls of gold coins.
But that is a legend you must forget. You must not speak of it.
Because here, where the seagulls float lazily over the mounds of trash,
and where the old woman you see whose grocery cart rattles over the road
shakes a cane at someone dead you can't even see with your own two eyes,
it is best to forget it all. It is just the cold wind you feel on your cheeks
today as autumn rattles the tree branches and tosses lost leaves around.
And the dark hulks of ransacked cars freeze in paralysis on the side streets
like metal trophies, cut down in the war zone where factories fade out.
And the old tramp's battered bicycle wheel hacks a rusty melody
as he cycles past you, teeth full of grit and a jaw line clouded with dirt.
And he cracks a crooked smile at you, waves his bottle as you pass him by.
You are the latest disembodied voice of the city. You thought
the city would be invincible--which is one of the ways that a beautiful
woman will fool you with her smoke & perfume. You thought
the mad woman city, sitting under your footsteps, would be the one storm
that didn't break across the horizon into vapor & defeat. Into delirium.
You thought that jazz & rock & roll would revival something. Some woman
that is not your property but is the King's mistress and is the one holiness
of all the broken things of a place that make it fertile & lovely like a woman.
There is nothing you can say to this wind here on Gratiot Avenue
as it blows down past St. Joseph Church and into the Dequindre Cut
where the graffiti artists scroll their comic strips of doom and gloom down
there. You thought the city, because it was paralyzed & hurt, was just
hiding behind its table with a bottle and a glass. That other cleaner city
it loved, beside it, linked by the tunnel and a bridge. The storm clouds
rolling wildly into each other as the tankers haul iron ore northeast on the river.
We put so much of the faith of our hearts into a place. We make it
a man when it is really a crazed woman sitting at a table and sipping the wind,
which roams through her teeth like musical notes, trumpets & birds.
We put so much of our faith into the desires we carry to each other--
is what you are thinking as you walk past the dog sniffing soul food outside
a restaurant. We put so much muscle into romance. And so you
remember it, this city. And a woman you laid down with in bed one night,
the smoking wind in her teeth and her quick eyes like false diamonds.
It was just the faith of your heart that you put so deep into her. That faith
that fooled you & startled you awake to find her at the window,
whispering to someone else on the phone. It was & always is this faith,
this blind faith, this delirious and foolish faith we weigh in and lose to something
else that binds us to it. There is nothing you can say to this autumn wind
blowing sideways on Gratiot Avenue. It is just the King that's come back
to get the birds he lost. All those years ago. When they sang here &
for nothing. For nothing. For nothing at all. Which to you was everything.
Also from Ken Meisel:
Grand River Avenue, Detroit Riots, 1967
The City is a Woman
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